The drought is taking its toll on the forests. “They are stressed by an episode of drought that is specific, but that should serve as a warning because the long periods of lack of rain will be increasingly frequent,” warns Joan Pino, director and researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (Creaf ). In the face of the climate crisis, experts agree that the best vaccine to safeguard forests – and their ecosystem services – is forest management and the preservation of a living rural world.
Beyond forestry exploitation – which consists of the extraction of wood for thermal or construction uses, among others –, one of the forest management recipes involves combining forest area with cropland, which stops the advance of fire in the event of a fire. fire. This is what is known as the agroforestry mosaic. “It would be convenient to replace those forests closest to urban areas with crops,” says the Creaf expert. Along these lines, the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda has created the Catalan Land Registry to recover abandoned crops and pastures. With this measure – not without controversy due to the difficulties in its implementation and effectiveness – the Generalitat seeks to avoid the depopulation of the territory, giving access to land to people who want to expand their farms or become farmers, as well as improve the current low level of food self-sufficiency in Catalonia.
In the last 20 years, around 100,000 hectares in Catalonia have stopped being cultivated and have been converted into forest areas. “We have gone from a situation of overexploitation of forest areas to great abandonment, which is why the current forest structure is so little resilient,” explains Joan Pino.
In areas with large areas of agricultural crops, the recommendation is to combine plantations with trees and shrubs due to the economic and environmental advantages of combining woody vegetation (trees or shrubs) with agricultural or livestock systems. Likewise, allowing vegetation to grow on the margins is positive for crop biodiversity and provides numerous benefits to agriculture, such as improved pest control and pollination.
But forests are much more than trees. The Forest Science and Technology Center of Catalonia (CTFC) has been researching and working for years to promote the cultivation of forestry products of increasing demand such as truffles, mushrooms, pine nuts and aromatic plants. Including some of these products in agricultural production chains would contribute to the creation of jobs in rural areas, the fight against depopulation and the conservation of natural forest resources.
“There has to be human life to be able to defend the forest. This means paying tolls to support mountain agriculture and, at the same time, getting the most out of forests, always within environmental limits, because forest untouchability policies have been shown to be the best way to lose it,” says Francesc Reguant, president of the agri-food economics commission of the Col·legi d'Economistes de Catalunya and member of the advisory council of the País Rural citizen movement.
